For my personal history education, I enjoyed the longer children’s nonfiction book (almost middle grade nonfiction) and detailed The Lost Colony of Roanoke by Jean Fritz. Fritz has a way of making history come alive. Her writing is geared for upper elementary school students or middle school students, and her book subsequently provides an increasing amount of detail about the colony’s purpose and possible reasons for its disappearance. Fritz’s book is lavishly illustrated by Hudson Talbott, and the beautiful illustrations make it a lovely book for pondering over.
As in Roanoke, the Lost Colony (reviewed here), Fritz doesn’t tell exactly what happened to the colony at Roanoke, of course. No one knows what happened. But these two books provide lots of clues for possibilities. Both authors leave it to the child reader to decide for themselves what they think happened.
Our homeschool American History learning happened to correlate to the Thanksgiving Holiday! We recently finished learning about the pilgrims, which works out very well for us since we’re taking the next week slow, as a holiday from lots of school work. But before we got the pilgrims, though, we read a few books about Roanoke and Jamestown.
